GAME THEORY

GAME THEORY; New York City on Screen: Love It or Fix It

By J. C. Herz

Published: May 6, 1999

NEW YORK CITY begs for simulation. It has been simulated in movies, books, paintings and avant-garde classical music, not to mention prime-time television. Inevitably, it has been assembled in digital media.

But just as there are different visions of the Big Apple on celluloid, there are different visions of New York in ones and zeros.

One vision is Sim City 3000, the latest installment in the best-selling line of virtual metropolis construction kits. Like its predecessors, Sim City 3000 puts you in the mayor's office of an urban hub, with all the attendant responsibilities: roads, power lines, water usage, zoning, public transportation, environmental policy, education, finance, garbage disposal, traffic, unemployment, law enforcement and public approval ratings. Build wisely, and your citizens will thrive.

It's an urban planning exercise with good production values. There are multiple levels of resolution, so you can zoom into different neighborhoods and see commercial zones filled with Lilliputian business people, industrial zones speckled with hard-hat workers and tiny firefighters loitering outside their stations. Downtown you'll hear traffic. In residential neighborhoods, you may hear birds chirping and children playing.

But where previous Sim City titles simulated a generic urban environment, this one allows you to create the Sim City That Never Sleeps. Not only can you build on a ready-made terrain that mirrors the contours of Manhattan, but there are also little landmarks to plant on the map: Grand Central Terminal, Lincoln Center, the United Nations, Rockefeller Center and the Statue of Liberty.

If you want to include the Chrysler Building and the Guggenheim, you can download them from the Web site (www.simcity.com), which recently posted a ''Build Manhattan'' contest for Sim City users.

Would-be Donald Trumps took considerable license. There was Trihattan, a fanciful version of the city with three downtowns, and Alotta-Opolis, which incorporates artificial lakes, a wheat field and a moat surrounding the American Museum of Natural History.

One contestant asked the judges to ''imagine N.Y. with San Francisco's TransAmerica tower, Houston's 700 Louisiana building, Hong Kong's Bank of China tower and the Arc de Triomphe in a relocated Central Park.''

Other players used landmarks from outside New York as place holders for buildings that aren't available. ''Trump Tower is represented by Columbia Seafirst Center, and the Citicorp Building is the 700 Louisiana,'' explained Gergory Jungenberg, a resident of Long Island City, N.Y. ''Flatiron Building is the Bank of America. Riker's Island has Alcatraz representing the prison there. Everything in this city is meticulously accurate.''

Of course, it isn't. There is no Times Square. The subways are wrong; they are much better than ours. There's a badly needed second line on the East Side and plenty of crosstown trains, for which we all yearn. There are also palm trees and an inexplicable geyser in Central Park.

But when you start to examine these model Manhattans block by block, as a resident, you're looking for another kind of simulation. You're not interested in the city-as-mechanism, with all moving parts in order. You want to see the city as a mirror of your memory, as a simulation of your personal experience.

For that sort of simulation, you would do better to examine City ROM, an annotated digital map of New York published by the Small Blue Planet Atlas Company. Like Sim City, City ROM allows you to zoom into an aerial view of the city. But unlike the computer game, City ROM's images are photographic, taken from satellite data. You are not able to construct and demolish generic buildings. But you are able to learn about real ones.

Map pointers correspond to images from the photo gallery, which are linked to text explanations:

''St. Paul's Chapel. Open 9 A.M.-3 P.M. Mon-Fri, 7 A.M.-3P.M. Sunday. This is where George Washington went immediately after his inauguration as the first President of the United States to kneel and pray for the union.''

''Chinatown mushroom market, Grand at Elizabeth.''

''Andy Warhol's loft. This loft/studio was owned for many years by Andy Warhol. Jean-Michel Basquiat, a famous 1980's painter/poet/graffiti artist and close fiend of Warhol's, rented the loft before and after Warhol's death. On Aug. 12, 1988, Basquiat was found dead inside from a drug overdose.''

All these places have addresses listed. In many cases, the phone numbers are listed as well. You can print maps showing how to get there. You can print the photos. Or you can add your own photos and your own notes, which become another set of color-coded markers on the map.

Within a few months, you'll be able to swap these cartographic scrapbooks on City ROM's Web site (www.cityromatlas.com) and show the world your New York, or see the city through the lens of someone else's experience. In the real city, you can retrace someone's steps. Or know that they might be retracing yours, although there's no way to ascertain whether any route is fact or fiction. And like the eccentric tour guide in Bennett Miller's film ''The Cruise,'' we are at liberty to use both. In the simulated city, any story is worthwhile.

Both City ROM and Sim City use overlays as a graphic device. In Sim City you can view water pipes, population density, land values, crime rates, transportation systems, flora or any combination of these elements. In City ROM, you can choose to display the map markers for museums, theaters, restaurants, libraries or your all-time greatest dates. Both sets of overlays are highly specific. But they reveal different sorts of truth: the mechanical truth of a city versus the narrative truth.

It's the difference between a model and a map. A model tells you that tab A goes into slot B. A map tells you that there be dragons here.

The former is theory. The latter is memory. Both are imperfect and incomplete, and that's why they are compelling. They beg us to tinker, to investigate or to tell stories -- even if they're not true. So that afterward we can say, ''This is my city because I built it.'' Or, ''This is my city because I've walked it.'' Or, ''This is my city because I made it up.''

When you build something, or discover something or invent something, it belongs to you. And who wouldn't lay claim to a few megabytes of the Big Apple?

Sim City 3000, by Electronic Arts; CD-ROM for Windows 95 and 98; $49.99. City ROM, by the Small Blue Planet Atlas Company; CD-ROM for Windows 95 and 98 and Mac; $58; available at www.cityromatlas.com. Both are for all ages.

Photo: CLOSE-UP -- Map pointers on City ROM correspond with a photo gallery.